By SAM LOW

I remember jumping off the old little wooden bridge that used to cross over to get to the beach by Young’s old house. Also digging the best steamers in that little waterway.

— Polly Pease

Among the most vivid memo ries of Harthaven folks who were children in the 1950s and 1960s is swimming in the channel between the Young’s house off Seaview avenue and the beach. It was all that remained of a much larger waterway that once connected the old jetties to the harbor. In the 1930s and 1940s, the channel had been deep enough to allow the passage of goodly-sized yachts. By the 1950s it had closed in a lot, so parents could allow young children to swim there safely because it was so shallow. A small wooden bridge allowed bathers to cross over the channel and go on to the beach about 100 to 150 feet beyond. Over the years, the channel silted in and the beach eroded and the bridge disappeared under the sand. A short while back, Jed Conlin was walking the beach and discovered the end of the bridge re-emerging, so I went down to take its picture.

This is pretty dramatic testimony to the erosion rate in the Harthaven area. Let’s say that in the 1950s there was 100 feet of beach from the end of the bridge where it crossed the channel to the edge of the ocean. Now the bridge is almost in the ocean. If my math is any good, that means we have lost more than a foot and a half of shoreline every year for the past 61 years.

Gazette contributor Sam Low is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Oak Bluffs.